A corporation or the like (e.g., an enterprise) wants to give its personnel access to its network, including direct (local) and remote access. However, there are multiple considerations as to what type of access is allowed, depending on the location of the user, the user's identity, the security state (health) of the requesting device and so on.
In many organizations, more and more people need to work from various locations, sometimes temporarily, and sometimes or on a regular basis. Such locations include locally (within the company), home, a friend's personal computer, an Internet kiosk in an airport or hotel, a branch office, another company (e.g., partner or vendor), a wireless hotspot, and so forth.
In general, each of these locations has a different access method associated with it, such as full tunnel IPSec or SSL-VPN, Web Publishing, Terminal Service Gateway, and so forth. This makes it complicated for end users to connect, as each user needs to consider which method to use from each scenario, and remember what steps are needed to gain access.